Orwell: the Observer years

George Orwell's books defined his times, and his journalism for The Observer defined the spirit of the newspaper. In the centenary of his birth we celebrate the novelist and essayist whose passion for precision in thought and language survived war, illness and family tragedy - and whose ideas became the bedrock of David Astor's paper

Today in the centenary of his birth, there is no shortage of interested parties eager to claim George Orwell as one of their own. Though renowned for following his own path and making his opinions as clear as polished glass, he has nonetheless been adopted by just about every political colour in the spectrum, from revolutionary red to Little-England blue, from hard-core Trotskyites to gung-ho neoconservatives, from utopian anarchists to old-fashioned High Tories. His gaunt, forlornly knowing features have become, as it were, the acceptable face of radicalism.

The process by which Orwell has been remoulded into a fits-all-sizes paragon is long and twisted, and not without interest (indeed there are whole bookcases of literature on the subject). But before he became a secular saint he was, first and to the last, a writer. And if it is not too clingingly possessive to mention, he was a writer for The Observer.

He was also, of course, a writer for many other publications. Orwell was almost as promiscuous as he was prodigious in his freelance journalism. It's also fair to say that his output for The Observer, while often first-rate, features few of the works on which his formidable reputation as a non-fiction writer rests. His celebrated 'As I Please' column, for example, was written for Tribune. His gentle but sharply observed meditations on English life - how to brew the perfect cup of tea and what constitutes the ideal pub - were published by the Evening Standard. And the groundbreaking forays into popular culture - his examinations of the British seaside postcard and boys' comics - and the revered polemical essays appeared in periodicals such as Horizon and Polemic.

Even so, the mark he left on this newspaper was arguably far more profound than his legacy elsewhere in Fleet and Grub streets, and not just because Horizon and Polemic quickly folded. What was different about The Observer is that Orwell's theory of journalistic writing - succinct, provocative, transparent - was designated the house style to which all the newspaper's writers were expected to aspire during its 'golden age' of the Fifties.

As early as 1938, The Observer had called Orwell 'a great writer' in its review of Homage to Catalonia, his account of his experience fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. This was by no means a universally shared judgment, as was shown by the fact that the book - now recognised as a genre-defining classic - sold a paltry 700 copies.

It was not until late 1941, though, that Orwell was asked to write for The Observer. At the time, the paper was edited by JL Garvin, a staunch Churchillian Tory, but it was owned by the Astor family. And it was Lord Astor's son, David Astor who first approached Orwell, following a recommendation by Cyril Connolly. Astor knew Orwell only by his patriotic call to arms, The Lion and The Unicorn, but already admired his clarity of thought.

For two old Etonians, their social backgrounds could hardly have been more contrasting. Orwell (né Eric Blair) was born in Bengal, the son of an official in the Indian Civil Service. He joined the imperial police force in Burma before taking up writing and tramping and writing about tramping. Astor was a scion of a multi-millionaire Anglo-American family. His mother, Nancy, was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons. Their country seat, Cliveden, was the scene of the kind of Edwardian lavishness that, were it not for Merchant and Ivory, would tax the modern imagination. Orwell wanted an end to the class system and economic inequality. Astor was a patrician liberal. Yet the two hit it off immediately.

Astor often slept at Orwell's Belsize Park flat during the blackout and, like a pair of overgrown students (Orwell never went to university and Astor dropped out of Oxford), the two would stay up discussing politics and the war. The conversations had a lasting influence on Astor. As Richard Cockett notes in his David Astor and The Observer, Orwell was 'the man who more than any other... helped to shape the new Observer'.

All the same, as much as Orwell warmed to Astor, it did not prevent him questioning his motives. When the younger man told him about the fiasco of the Allied raid on Dieppe and concluded that it was impossible to invade Europe, Orwell noted in his diary: 'Of course, we can't be sure he wasn't planted to say this, considering who his parents are.'

One of Orwell's preoccupations throughout this period was Indian independence, a cause that was widely ignored during wartime, not least because the Japanese were calling for the British to leave India. It was also the subject of his first, unsigned, contribution to The Observer on 22 February 1942, under the title 'India Next'. It was not the most auspicious of beginnings, but it did point to a change of direction in the paper. For one thing, it was very likely the paper's first anti-colonial piece and, for another, many more were to follow.

Shortly after, Garvin was replaced by Ivor Brown, although the real driving force was now Astor - who, curiously enough, was actually employed as an officer in the Royal Marines.

Orwell was himself working for the BBC in the Indian section of the Overseas Service. His superiors were less than enthusiastic about his moonlighting and, in return, Orwell resented what he saw as the corporation's bureaucracy and censorship. He had also grown disillusioned with his own role as a propagandist, his contorted attempt to distinguish between 'honest' and 'dishonest' propaganda evidently having failed. He resigned in September 1943.

At that point, as Gordon Bowker writes in his vivid new biography (George Orwell, Little Brown), 'there was some talk of him joining The Observer full-time, but to David Astor's relief, this idea came to nothing. After the war Astor became the paper's editor and the worst thing he could have imagined, he said, was having to reject anything written by Orwell.'

Instead Orwell became Tribune 's literary editor and a fortnightly book reviewer for The Observer. Even so, there was a series of attempts to send him abroad as a reporter. Early in '43 The Observer had asked him to be a war correspondent in North Africa. But Orwell failed the medical and soon after succumbed to a bronchitis attack that left him bed-ridden for three weeks.

Perhaps at this juncture we should pause to consider his position. He was about to turn 40; save among a few intellectuals, he was unknown; he had enjoyed next to no success as a novelist and his work as a journalist, while respected, had brought little material reward; he was married and desperate for a child (he believed himself to be infertile); he carried a bullet-wound in his neck from his time fighting in Spain; and he was chronically sick. He had seven years left to live, a good deal of them spent ill in bed or hospital, and all of them under the shadow of war and its austere aftermath. Yet the two novels that would make him famous throughout the world, and much of his finest journalism, were yet to be written.

Two years later The Observer succeeded in gaining Orwell's services as a war reporter. How the paper achieved this, given the state of the writer's health, is not known, but Bowker is not alone in speculating that Astor used his contacts to circumvent a medical.

Orwell was stationed in Paris at the well-named Hotel Scribe. Also present were Malcolm Muggeridge and AJ Ayer, both working for British intelligence, and Harold Acton, the dandyish aesthete whom Orwell knew from Eton. Muggeridge introduced Orwell to PG Wodehouse, under house arrest for suspected collusion with the Nazis, which led him to write 'In Defence of PG Wodehouse', again an argument that was a long way from fashionable.

He also met Hemingway, from whom, according to the American, he requested a gun. Orwell had worried about being the target of a Stalinist hit ever since his experiences at the hands of Soviet agents in Barcelona. Continual intellectual attacks by Soviet sympathisers, not to mention the assassination of Trotsky, had done nothing to ease his paranoia. Apparently Hemingway lent him a Colt .32 pistol.

Orwell narrowly missed meeting Albert Camus when the Frenchman had to pull out of a rendezvous at the Deux Magots café due to illness. The two authors admired one another's work, and that was not all they had in common. Like Orwell, Camus was tubercular and, also like the Englishman, he would die (albeit in a car crash) at 46.

The Observer of 25 March 1945 ran an Orwell piece filed from Germany entitled 'Creating Order Out Of Cologne Slum'. Two weeks later he followed it up with an article about the 'Future Of A Ruined Germany'. In between his wife, Eileen, died in hospital in London during a routine operation to remove a growth in her womb.

The previous summer they had adopted a baby boy, Richard. It was the child's dreadful destiny to lose two sets of parents before he was seven. (In the event, he was brought up by Orwell's sister Avril, and became a farmer, as Orwell had once hoped he would in a letter to a friend.) Eileen wrote to her husband before the operation detailing her joy at Richard and her despair at living in London. She looked forward to a life beyond the decrepit confines of the capital. By all accounts, Orwell was not the most attentive of husbands, and was prone to affairs, but it seems that he had grown closer to his wife after Richard's adoption.

The crushing sense of loss he must have experienced was reflected in the devastated landscape he encountered on his return to continental Europe following Eileen's funeral. 'To walk through the ruined cities of Germany,' he wrote in The Observer on 8 April, 'is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.'

In all he filed 19 dispatches from the Continent. Most were written from Paris, but he also travelled to Nuremberg, Stuttgart - where he eloquently described the looting that followed its collapse - and Austria.

Taken together, these pieces read not as straightforward reporting, nor even reportage, but more like a sober summary of events that were too large, and too chaotic, to summarise. He had wanted to witness the remnants of a totalitarian regime and found, instead, a defeated people much like any other. Astor did not think reporting was Orwell's strongest suit. In the circumstances the singular achievement was not what he wrote but that he wrote.

As Orwell acknowledged, Eileen, a former student of Tolkien's, had played an influential role in helping to plan a short novel he had completed in the summer of 1944. It was one of many sadnesses that the woman who believed so unshakably in her husband was not alive to witness the publication of Animal Farm in August 1945 and the overdue recognition it would bring.

The book, a brilliantly simple satire on the Russian Revolution, was initially turned down by several publishers, fearful of offending Britain's Soviet allies. At that time, and right up until 1956 and even beyond, the majority of this country's left-wing intelligentsia was engaged full-time in closing its eyes to the reality of life in the Soviet Union. The enemy, as far as they were concerned, was fascism. Orwell, to his undying credit, realised that the enemy was totalitarianism in its totality.

While Orwell's critics comfortably outnumbered his supporters during his lifetime, the ratio is now reversed. But that is not to say there aren't still plenty of critics. They tend to divide into two groups: those who say he failed because he 'sold out' the revolutionary cause, and those who say he failed because he would not give it up.

From the latter group, Louis Menand, recently writing in the New Yorker, played down Orwell's consistent opposition to imperialism, fascism and Stalinism. 'The important question, after condemning those things, was what to do about them, and how to understand the implications for the future. On this level, Orwell was almost always wrong.'

It's true that his predictions were frequently way off the mark, as he himself admitted. But to read Orwell as some kind of twentieth-century political Nostradamus is to miss the power of his message. He was a dissenter, not a strategist, much less a prophet. He may often have been wrong about getting it right, but in the crucial matters he was right about what was wrong.

And sometimes, if properly articulated, that is enough. Animal Farm was one such case. It portrayed in words a child could understand what so many adults had refused to comprehend: the inevitable corruption of a revolution that is controlled from the top.

With the publication of Animal Farm Orwell resigned as literary editor of Tribune, although he continued to write the 'As I Please' column for another two years. Astor, whose family owned land on Jura, recommended the Hebridean isle for a holiday. Orwell was so taken with the place that he rented a farmhouse called Barnhill on the northern tip of the island for the summer. In the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima, the remote island must have seemed like a prelapsarian retreat from the horrors of modernity.

But you would have to spend a long time scouring the British Isles to find a more hostile environment for a man with TB. There was no electricity, the rain scarcely ceased, and the house was 25 miles from the nearest doctor. It might be stretching the point to say that Orwell was a masochist (at least one woman he knew said he was a sadist), but his attitude to his health was wilfully reckless.

The correspondence between Orwell and Astor intensified. Barnhill had no phone and was two days of gruelling travel from London, so there was little choice. Orwell's letters were bucolic - lots of stuff about horses, flowers and fishing - but the references to the house suggest that 'spartan' may be too generous a description. 'I still haven't got the hot water running,' he informs Astor. And later: 'Do come across if you're ever at Tarbert. There's plenty of room here, tho still a bit rough (eg, no sheets on the beds!).'

In April 1946 Horizon published 'Politics and the English Language', Orwell's meditation on how to write what you mean and mean what you write. For years afterwards, Astor circulated the piece to every journalist who joined the paper. Ironically, it is not one of the crystalline essayist's clearest efforts. He never quite succeeds in making his case that dishonest politics leads to poor English and that, in turn, poor English leads to even less honest politics. The set of rules he recommends are hit and miss, and his examples of good and bad English often appear to be based on nothing more solid than his own preferences (short words) and prejudices (foreign words).

However, within the broad confusion and conflation of his arguments, there are paragraphs and sections that are so exquisitely precise that it is almost impossible to read them without wishing to write better. For example:

'The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.'

These were no doubt just the cautionary words that the confident young group of Oxbridge graduates Astor was assembling needed to hear. During the war, the heart, or more accurately the brain, of the newspaper was made up of brilliant émigrés such as Isaac Deutscher, Sebastian Haffner and Jon Kimche. Now Astor turned his attention to a new generation of homegrown writers for whom, in VS Pritchett's memorable phrase, Orwell would perform the role of 'wintry conscience'.

Between the end of the war and the mid-Fifties an exceptional group of young journalists, among them Patrick O'Donovan and Kenneth Tynan, joined the paper. To the moral seriousness established by Orwell and others, they added a crisp wit and a panache welcomed by a country emerging from some stark and difficult years. Between 1942, when Astor first became involved, and 1956, when The Observer overtook the Sunday Times, the circulation went from under 250,000 to more than 550,000.

Orwell maintained a close interest in upcoming talent. As late as 1949, he answered Astor's inquiry about employing one wayward writer. 'I think Philip Toynbee is a good idea. I don't know him well, but he seems to me to be quite gifted and politically OK.'

Toynbee went on to become The Observer's leading book reviewer. Orwell was himself a master of the form. He always got straight to the core of a book's argument and if he found it wanting he could be as brutal with his friends as his enemies. One Observer review of a book by HG Wells, his one-time dinner host, was so savage that the old man never spoke to him again.

Few contemporary appraisals of seminal works manage to stay the distance, but, 50 years on, his reviews, for instance, of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture stand up as well, if not better, than the books themselves. The latter, written in his sick bed in November 1948, was one of Orwell's last pieces for The Observer. Often misunderstood as a voice of doom, he roused himself against Eliot's pessimism (which, under the circumstances, he had every right not to) and concluded: 'Before writing off our own age as irrevocably damned, is it not worth remembering that Matthew Arnold and Swift and Shakespeare - to carry the stock back only three centuries - were all equally certain that they lived in a period of decline?'

The sick bed was in Jura. What was he doing there in November? He had already been hospitalised earlier in the year with TB, just when The Observer ludicrously hoped to send him to cover the South African elections. On that occasion Astor had been able to arrange the importation of streptomycin, a TB wonder drug available only in the US, to help treat Orwell. Now he was about to return to hospital for the final time.

The previous winter had been harsh and there was a severe fuel shortage. Even armed with his royalty cheques from Animal Farm, he was still reduced to burning his son's toys to heat their leaking London flat. 'I think it will be easier to keep warm here,' he wrote to Astor from Jura, 'as we are better off for coal etc.' It's hard to decide from that sentence which was most helpless - post-war Britain or Orwell himself.

He had also returned to Jura to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was his last and most powerful warning against allowing truth to become the ruthless monopoly of the state. Read today, it may seem like a dated piece of futurism. But that's only from the perspective of a society that has had the benefit of its wisdom. If a translated copy fell into the hands of a North Korean, it would probably seem like a work of pure naturalism written this morning.

The effort to complete it surely killed Orwell, who was forced to type the manuscript himself; his publisher, Alfred Secker, having failed to arrange a stenographer. Orwell knew that his time was up. When he was told by Astor, on publication of the novel, that The Observer was making him the subject of its profile, he wrote back that perhaps it ought be refashioned as an obituary.

This time the streptomycin was of no use (had he lived for another few months, a new drug might have saved him). He married Sonia Bronwell, a young editor at Horizon, on 13 October 1949. He was looking for a widow, a literary executor, and Bronwell agreed after several other women had turned him down. Astor sorted out the licence required for a marriage in hospital. He was also best man. On 21 January 1950, the bridegroom died.

Again, Astor took care of arrangements. Orwell, the atheist, had requested that he be buried according to the rites of the Church of England. Astor found a plot in the churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. It was only right that at the end the editor of The Observer watched over Orwell, for the writer, even if he was not aware of it, had watched inspirationally over The Observer. Half a century on, Big Brother is not watching us, but let us hope that at this newspaper George Orwell continues to for many years to come.

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About this article

George Orwell: the Observer years

This article appeared on p1 of the Observer Review section of the Observer
on Saturday 10 May 2003.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 07.07 EDT on Sunday 11 May 2003.
It was last modified at 07.07 EDT on Friday 4 July 2003.
It was first published at 07.07 EDT on Friday 4 July 2003.